Train robberies — big or small — aren't new to California

They were really yelling, "Rob 'em up!" It was true that they tied scarves around their faces and blew up train car doors and safes with dynamite (although not always with the expected results). It is not a lie that they derailed railways to remove the loot.

The tradition of train robbery became so big in our mythical history (Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and the Dalton gang) that what is happening now in Los Angeles, with the looting of Union Pacific cargo, is a surprisingly serious heist. low-tech and random in an age where millions can be stolen with the click of a mouse.

The mutilation of boxes and packages along the railroad tracks looks like a crime scene to a Santa Claus sleigh on Christmas Eve.

These crimes often come on the heels of new technologies. When miners began to extract gold and silver from the hills and streams of California and Nevada, the stagecoaches that transported the goods from one place to another were the first to be stopped and looted.

But the trains, those huge wagons that carried hundreds of times more weight than horses, lured criminals from the highways to the rail lines.

It appears that the first such robbery in California was in 1881. One group, led by a man who had not been good at gold mining, decided to intercept the loot of the precious metal from others, at a less laborious stage. It happened east of Colfax, on the edge of the Sierra, near the dizzying section of the Cape Horn Railroad, on the side of the mountain.

The gang deliberately damaged the rails, and when the locomotive and perhaps other cars on the train overturned, they came in with guns. But the custodians of the Wells Fargo and mail cars stood their ground. The thieves left empty handed; They were found and tried.

The best part of this saga, says the book "“Great Train Robberies of the Old West”, is that during the trial it was learned that Wells, Fargo & Co., which had not lost nor penny and complained about a costly and unforgiving prosecution, he had not paid local taxes in several years, a sum close to $90,000.

That little nugget of information upset the somewhat fierce local taxpayers, because they were footing the bill for the botched thieves' trial. They ended up with two convictions, two acquittals, and some hard feelings against Wells Fargo. Shadows of modern billionaires who deceive the public coffers for their own benefit.

The Central Valley was plagued by train robberies in the last decade of the 19th century. These were serious heists, complete with gunfights, corpses sifted with bullets and explosives to open a path to the stash of goods, which was not always as rich as the thieves hoped.

For a time, two of the men, Chris Evans and an aggrieved former Southern Pacific Railroad brakeman named John Sontag, evaded the law and gained a reputation as folk heroes, even after a massive manhunt and shootout took their lives. de Sontag and two law enforcement officers.

The Times complained that “seeing such a man [Evans] being regarded by many as a hero, it is not surprising that many young men prefer to emulate him rather than try to do honest work for modest pay.”

Evans, who lost an eye and an arm in the shooting, escaped from prison and was tracked to his home in Visalia. Realizing the game was up, he sent his youngest son to the sheriff with a note: “Come to my house with no guns and no one will hurt you. I want to talk to you". He and his men duly surrendered.

In 1893, even as the Evans-Sontag gang was on the run for blowing up a Southern Pacific (SP) train and taking thousands of coins, Evans' wife and teenage daughter, Eva, appeared onstage in "Evans and Sontag, or, the Visalia Bandits”, a mediocre play about train robbery.

A reporter from the San Francisco Examiner asked Eva if she had stage fright at the prospect of her acting. "Why? It is nothing, compared to living reality,” she replied.

In the early 20th century, train robbery was on its way to movie genre status. Taking advantage of the headlines, a 12-minute movie called "The Great Train Robbery" - the granddaddy of all subsequent such films - ended spectacularly, with an actor facing the camera firing his gun four , five, six times to the audience. It was a feeling.

Ten years later, in 1913, when John Sontag's brother George was released, he announced his intention to make and star in a film about the gang's deadly shootout with the law. There is no evidence that he did it, but it was a proposal that attracted attention.

It should be noted here that South Pacific was not well regarded by residents of the Central Valley. The railroad was aggressive, had sharp business practices, and had spawned land speculation, profits, and bankruptcies, depending on where it put its tracks or chose not to.

All this had come to a bloody boiling point in 1880, in a murder incident at Mussel Slough, near Hanford. After very complicated, sometimes murky years of railway land and settlement claims, squatting, eviction battles and challenges to the power of the train, the Mussel Slough shooting took the lives of seven men, five of them from the group of colonists.

Some of the survivors were convicted on federal charges and spent months in prison. Afterward, they returned home as conquering heroes.

“Remember Mussel Slough!” was on the lips of farmers throughout the Central Valley, and the event gained mythic status in fiction with Frank Norris's very famous novel, "The Octopus," which in prose and in the public mind cemented Southern Pacific as the father of all villains.

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The family of Chris Evans' wife had allegedly lost their Mussel Slough property claims against Southern Pacific, which could explain much, including the gang's popular acclaim.

Evans swore to the end that he had never committed the robberies and was paroled in 1911 by Governor Hiram Johnson.

Let's talk coming full circle: Johnson was the progressive Republican who pushed California reforms like the referendum, initiative and recall, measures that gave voters a chance to avoid the deadly grip the railroads had on the state's politicians.

From that Greek tragedy tale, let's move on to a comic opera: Dalton's notorious gang. Regardless of his win-loss record elsewhere, his one California foray into bank robbery ended in humiliation—his own—and death—someone else.

In February 1891, near the town now called Earlimart, a trio of masked Daltons on horseback stopped an SP train. The driver was shot, and one brother fired shots into the air to keep the passengers at bay, while the others tried to force the guard inside the car to open the door. Instead, the custodian began shooting through a peephole until the robbers gave up and walked away empty-handed.

Much closer to Los Angeles, a couple pulled off two train robberies, one of them in Sun Valley, which was then named after Roscoe, and the best (and most unlikely) story is that it got the name because “Roscoe” was in criminal jargon the way to call a gun.

Sadly for local legend, the place was already called "Roscoe" in the news papers. And they sprouted.

In 1893 and a year later, a convicted horse thief named W.H. 'Kid' Thompson and a man from Big Tujunga named Alvarado Johnson, who had lost his ranch to high shipping prices for SP farm products, stopped two different trains, they derailed one of them and stole them.

The first time they raised $150. The second, they got $1,500 in gold and silver coins, and eventual life sentences, because the accident killed a train firefighter and a homeless man.

Thompson managed to hold a new trial. Just before it began, he sent a bombastic letter to The Times, which had once pontificated that "the hanging of some of the outlaws involved in this business would have a salutary effect." The accused protested saying that the newspapers "have made an effort to apply all kinds of epithets to me that stigmatize me as a murderer in flagrante."

When it comes to the chaos now erupting with the Union Pacific robberies, it's good to look back to early December 1902, when Angelenos sent Christmas gifts to the East Coast by train, and the more prosperous sent jewelry, money and values.

The Times doesn't say how the case against Charles Ray Spaulding ended, but Los Angeles law enforcement officials say he was the driver of a Wells Fargo boxcar as loaded with riches as a pasha's treasure, headed for the station. Santa Fe for the 8 pm train, when curiosity got the best of him.

He stopped his truck in Eastlake Park and began rummaging through boxes like a kid on Christmas morning, tossing wrappers around, ripping open envelopes containing money and valuables, and shredding the driver's logbook of driver information. shipments. That which was too heavy to carry - large pieces of silver and elegant luggage - was left behind when Spaulding absconded.

For almost 10 years, the offender was missing. When they found him, he was in Sing Sing prison in New York. Back in Los Angeles for trial, he tried to escape by cutting the bars off his cell window and hiding the cuts with blackened soap.

That was so old school! Once again, as he changed monetary technology, so did crime. In 1904, after thieves tossed a safe from an SP railroad express car north of San Luis Obispo, a Wells Fargo man named Campbell doubted there was much inside.

“There was a time when almost every train through this part of the country carried a good fortune in cash on its express car… Now it's different. There are other means of transporting it, and one of the favorite methods is simply transferring it to banks.”

Campbell commented on the “less and less frequent quick robberies each year. When criminals realize they will only get a few hundred dollars…they hesitate before taking risks that may end in a [railroad] messenger's sawed-off shotgun or a harsh sentence from the Court.”

So, they lowered the frequency. “John Bostick” did not look for a safe when he robbed an SP train near El Monte in 1913, he preferred to go after the riches of the passengers and killed an undercover agent of the company, who tried to prevent the theft of the engagement ring of a traveler

Bostick had committed a similar crime near Oakland a month earlier and, when he was arrested, he was carrying a sapphire from that heist and a pawn ticket for the ring. His real name was Ralph Fariss, and he had committed misdeeds since he was a teenager and sent to reform school.

His sick parents recognized his picture in the newspaper and set out to visit his son in San Quentin before he was hanged. It was out of respect for them, he said, that he had used a friend's name and not his own. "It will be better for my father and mother if I do it as Bostick and not as Fariss." His father, perhaps not coincidentally, had been a SP driver and had lost a leg in an accident.

A few weeks after the execution, “an educated Englishman” said that JW Burke had confessed to holding up a mail car near Los Angeles' main train station. By then, life imitated the movies that reproduced life. Burke's associate, described by The Times as a "cocaine addict" named Jean La Banta and an expert on railroad robberies, told the agent in the car: "Steal 'em." The next day, Barry received his share of the loot from him: $30.

Such was the pressure that was exerted for a law to equalize the crime that, in 1905, it became punishable by death or murder someone by derailing a train. It was that legislation that was considered in Los Angeles a hundred years after a suicide bomber parked his gasoline-soaked Jeep on a Metrolink track in Glendale and killed eleven people in the derailment. He was convicted of 11 counts of manslaughter, but not of train crash.

And now, my confession: I come from a family of train robbers.

During the Depression, a great-uncle who worked for the railroad would alert my grandfather when a coal train was coming through town.

My grandfather's two oldest sons, my uncles, then probably 10 and 11 years old (my father was still too young for such family things) would hurry a mile or more out of town, climb aboard the coal car rolling stock, they dumped as many pieces of coal as they could, then got off the train and came back later with a wheelbarrow to pick up what they had dropped.

It kept them warm during the winter. Don't worry, officers, I'll be leaving quietly.

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